It’s time to stop hitting the snooze button

Time and time again, the research community is told of the benefits of working at a European rather than national level: the economies of scale, the pooling of brainpower and budgets to achieve greater things, the avoidance of duplication that occurs when similar research projects are undertaken in different European countries.

And yet ambitious European collaborations seem to hit the same hurdles time and time again.

The latest evidence of such difficulties can be found in the, “First Interim Evaluation of the Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Joint Undertaking” report, quietly published on the project’s new website as everyone prepared for the summer break on July 20 and brought to wider attention at the beginning of this week. The evaluation, carried out by an independent expert group, highlights many weaknesses including the all-too-familiar laments of burdensome rules and regulations, call procedures being too long and complicated, a lack of coordination with national programmes.

This matters, not only for the fuel cell programme, but also because so many other European R&D projects are being shaped in a similar way.

In fairness, the report is also says the Fuel Cell & Hydrogen project, created in May 2008 to position Europe at the forefront of this critical energy technology, should be maintained and supported. The approach is generally seen as a good way to enhance public-private activities in technology development and demonstration, and overall its existence is considered to be “an improvement to the R&D landscape.”

But however noble the joint undertaking’s goals may be its organisation, management and coordination comes in for the usual depressing criticisms. The list of problems makes for a sobering read. It’s hard not to think the report should be compulsory reading for anyone working in, or planning to get involved with a collaborative pan-European project, so that the same mistakes are not made again.

From the beginning everything was too slow. The idea was first floated in 2003; via the usual bureaucratic byways it took until 2008 to set up the joint undertaking. Even then things didn’t go smoothly. “The establishment of structures and activities in the first two years was not as efficient as would have been wished and expected,” the report says in its own bureaucrat-speak. “Steps should be taken to ensure similar problems are not repeated elsewhere in future.”

The experts conclude that industry’s presence in projects isn’t as strong as would be hoped, saying industrial leadership is difficult to identify “in a substantial proportion of current projects”. They propose this may be because industrial participants don’t want “to undertake what they perceive as a (sic) time-consuming and unrewarding administration,” but add that industrial leadership of projects is essential and that specific efforts are needed to ensure this happens.

Another familiar recommendation in the report is a call to improve collaboration and alignment with member states’ R&D programmes and activities in fuel cells. “Generally it seems the member states are disengaged from the operation and steering of the [project],” the report notes. “It is especially disappointing that formal interaction and coordination with member states’ programmes appears weak,” it goes on to say. Unless this situation is turned around, the joint undertaking will struggle to achieve its ambition of leading the way in technology development and progression to market, the report says.

A knock-on of this lack of strong coordination with national fuel cell research programmes is the difficulty in attracting attention beyond Europe. The joint undertaking is meant to have a scale and a reach across Europe that makes it a natural partner, but as long as some EU member states lack enthusiasm about the project and pursue their own bilateral international collaborations, establishing a strong global presence will be a challenge. The joint undertaking needs to develop a strategy and priorities for international outreach, engagement and cooperation, the report says.

In fact, the joint undertaking needs to improve its overall communications strategy, according to the experts. It’s rather surprising to learn that there is no formal plan for communicating and disseminating the research results and other outputs flowing from the project. This is something that is now being worked on, but according to the report “should be addressed more urgently” so that the joint undertaking becomes the go-to place for information on European fuel cell and hydrogen efforts. “There is an urgent need to increase [….] visibility, with a clear identity and mission,” the report concludes.

And of course, this interim evaluation is not the first such report. When similar assessments of two other joint technology initiatives (JTI) - the embedded computing systems JTI, Artemis, and the nanoelectronics JTI, Eniac – were published a little over a year ago, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes called those reports a, “wake-up call”.

Which leaves one to ponder: How many wake-up calls are needed before things actually begin to change?

Report on the Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Joint Undertaking: http://www.fch-ju.eu/page/publications

The Artemis and Eniac reports: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/information_society/evaluation/rtd/jti/